10 Types of Acting Teacher/Acting Coach
There are many types of acting teacher or acting coach. Often when we experience problems with our acting teachers, we blame ourselves. Well, I’m an acting coach, and I can tell you sometimes, it’s not your fault. Sometimes the type of acting teacher/acting coach that you have is preventing you from getting the most out of it. Your acting teacher may be a combination of any of these:
ONE: The Enthusiastic Amateur
Probably a friend of a friend, sometimes a failed actor turned high school drama teacher turned amateur acting coach. It’s lovely that they want to help, but they’ll probably end up confusing you and giving you bad advice. How can they help it? They’re not a professional, they mean well, but in the end they’ll probably fail you due to a lack of vocational knowledge in application. They won’t know how to teach you to act, they’ll talk about feelings and space and emotions and whatever clever things pop into their heads, but they are not an acting coach.
TWO: The Unemployed (Fill in the Blank)
There are lots of unemployed actors or directors or something else that set themselves up as acting teachers. I’ll be honest, learning to act does not equip you to teach acting, it’s a very different skills. Teaching people to act requires the ability to break it down into learnable chunks. I’d say 99% of the time, they weren’t taught in a way that they could learn from, so they will struggle to patch it together into something that they can teach you. They’re only there to make a bit of cash on the side while they wait for their next gig – even worse, if they’re a famous face – trading on their name.
THREE: The Dinosaur
Old fashioned, has no real technique, lots of focus on speech and elocution. They’ve been around since the dawn of time and they may have some great things to say about acting, some wonderful stories, but they’re completely hopeless when it comes to help you prepare for anything in this century. “When I was at the Royal Academy…”
FOUR: The Academic
A university lecturer that has to teach acting courses, can be a frustrated actor, director, writer – even worse, a true academic, someone that never touched the stage in his life and now because of their position believes they can teach acting because they understand it in theory.
FIVE: The Brutaliser
Claims to be honest and sincere. Claims to seeking the truth, telling the truth, but rarely is. Claims to break you down with the truth and build you back up again. Really, they’re just a bully, they have no idea how to apply their methodologies to you, so when you don’t comply with them, you get viciously brutalised. They call these brutalisations ‘honesty’ and they try to make you believe that you needed it. Bullshit! They’re just abusive.
SIX: The Fanatic
So deeply ingrained in their approach that they cannot see any other way of working. Fallen for their own ranting and ravings. A disciple of the cult of whatever Method they’ve convinced themselves works. Treats acting like a religion, and the price for failing to be faithful to their religion, is severe. Zealots rarely analyse their own beliefs, only look for ways to reinforce the beliefs they have.
SEVEN: The Well-Meaning Hippy Twat
Somewhere lost in the Sixties, bare footed and deeply empathic. Shares a lot of positive qualities with the Empowerer, but only in theory, they can’t put it into practice. A lot of their approaches are fun games, whacky shenanigans and out there ‘Post Grotowski-esque’ performance art which really makes it fun to be with them, but at the end of the session, you’ve taken away nothing tangible. Unfortunately, drama and performance art and professional actor training in the UK, are as far apart as Hello and Goodbye. They’re well meaning but…
EIGHT: The Remarkable Self Publicist
Everywhere you look his face is there. You can’t get away from him. His marketing budget is huge because he charges high fees, promising whole potatoes but barely even delivering fries. But behind the glossy promotional material and the clever words, he’s simply a charlatan in disguise. Sorry, did I say he? I meant HE.
NINE: The Director
Can’t tell you how to help yourself, so they basically just direct you. This direction may be stunningly brilliant in that moment and in that situation, but it doesn’t empower you to help yourself next time. So rather than learning to act, you’re simply learning to take direction – but at the same time they are teaching you to become dependent on the director. This person is hindering you for the basic reason that they are taking away your ability to work by yourself.
TEN: The Empowerer
Honest, but never brutal. Friendly, approachable but not interested in pleasing people. They’re never interested in breaking you down, because they know that without a doctorate in psychology, that’s a dangerous place to be, and anyway, you don’t need breaking down, the person you are is fascinating and can act their socks off without expensive pseudo-psychology bullshit. Their only aim is to make you better, doesn’t throw stuff at you and hope it sticks. Is obsessed with their vocation as a professional acting coach and their eager is rarely part of the equation. For this person, it’s about you, and not them.
The Empowerer is someone I aspire to be. They don’t give their students false promises, they don’t ever brutalise them for misunderstanding, they always try to find new ways to explain things better so that more people understand. They don’t show off about past triumphs, they don’t hide behind flashy marketing and big prices. They’re often humble, sincere and perhaps even that the principles that they personally live by, are somewhat akin to those of their approach to acting.